Golden Age

In classical Greek mythology, the Golden Age was presided over by the leading Titan Cronus;[3] in Latin authors it was associated with the god Saturn.

But in the Bronze Age, when men became violent and greedy, she fled to the stars, where she appears as the constellation Virgo, holding the scales of Justice, or Libra.

[5] European pastoral literary tradition often depicted nymphs and shepherds as living a life of rustic innocence and peace, set in Arcadia, a region of Greece that was the abode and center of worship of their tutelary deity, goat-footed Pan, who dwelt among them.

Hesiod maintains that during the Golden Age, before the invention of the arts, the earth produced food in such abundance that there was no need for agriculture: [Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils.

Ovid's poetry was likely a prime source for the transmission of the myth of the Golden Age during the period when Western Europe had lost direct contact with Greek literature.

Initiation into its secret rites, together with ascetic practices, was supposed to guarantee the individual's soul eventual release from the grievous circle of mortality and also communion with the gods.

[citation needed] Orphics sometimes identified the Golden Age with the era of the god Phanes, who was regent over the Olympus before Cronus.

In the 5th century BCE, the philosopher Empedocles, like Hesiod before him, emphasized the idea of primordial innocence and harmony in all of nature, including human society, from which he maintained there had been a steady deterioration until the present.

However, in the 3rd century BCE, the Greek poet, Theocritus, writing in Alexandria, set his pastoral poetry on the lushly fertile island of Sicily, where he had been born.

Writing in Latin during the turbulent period of revolutionary change at the end of the Roman Republic (roughly between 44 and 38 BCE), the poet Virgil moved the setting for his pastoral imitations of Theocritus back to an idealized Arcadia in Greece, thus initiating a rich and resonant tradition in subsequent European literature.

Ostensibly about agriculture, the Georgics are in fact a complex allegory about how man's alterations of nature (through works) are related to good and bad government.

Although Virgil does not mention the Golden Age by name in the Georgics, he does refer in them to a time where man was in harmony with nature before the reign of Jupiter, when: Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen To mark the plain or mete with boundary-line.

ante Iouem nulli subigebant arua coloni ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum fas erat; in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat.

[9] In his famous essay, "Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition",[10] Erwin Panofsky remarks how in ancient times, "that particular not overly opulent, region of central Greece, Arcady, came to be universally accepted as an ideal realm of perfect bliss and beauty, a dream incarnate of ineffable happiness, surrounded nevertheless with a halo of 'sweetly sad' melancholy":

To be sure, this real Arcady was the domain of Pan, who could be heard playing the syrinx on Mount Maenalus; and its inhabitants were famous for their musical accomplishments as well as for their ancient lineage, rugged virtue, and rustic hospitality.There are analogous concepts in the religious and philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent.

All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.Old Norse: Gullaldr ("Age of Gold") is used in Gylfaginning to describe the period after the creation of the world, and before the arrival of three women out of Jötunheimr, who have been proposed to be the Norns.

Aes Sedai were frequently devoted to academic endeavours, one of which inadvertently resulted in a hole – The Bore – being drilled in the Dark One's prison.

Barrie's further works about Peter Pan[23][24] depict early childhood as a time of pre-civilised naturalness and happiness, which is destroyed by the subsequent process of education.

Usually, the term "Golden Age" is bestowed retroactively, when the period in question has ended and is compared with what followed in the specific field discussed.

For example, on July 27, 2020, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, published a post on Twitter promising a future "golden age" once the country recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.